Dear Read Receipts

Dear Read Receipts,

You have turned “seen at 21:14” into enough evidence for three friends, two screenshots and a reconstruction of someone’s entire evening.

At 21:16, they are probably driving. At 21:32, perhaps their phone died. At 21:47, they post a Story from a restaurant, and our friend is zooming into the reflection on a wine glass to see who is paying.

Before you arrived, people could ignore us in private. You gave the rejection a timestamp and left us to supply the motive.

We are switching you off. If we wanted to monitor somebody’s movements unpaid, we would have stayed in the relationship.

Yours, last seen recovering,

Dear John